109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  In 1928, during his postdoctoral studies in Europe, a bout of tuberculosis brought Oppie back to the Pecos Valley for an extended stay. At Katherine Page’s suggestion, Oppie and his brother leased a homestead in Cowles, a mile or so from her guest ranch, eventually purchasing it outright and turning it into a shared retreat. Katherine Page christened it Perro Caliente, Spanish for “hot dog,” and a more mellifluous translation of the idiom Oppie reportedly uttered upon laying eyes on it for the first time. Once again, the climate proved therapeutic, and after a summer of “miscellaneous debauch,” his condition had improved enough to allow him to return to Europe as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow. Oppenheimer divided his fellowship year between three European centers of physics—Leiden, Utrecht, and Zurich—but when a stubborn cough worsened even in the invigorating altitudes of Switzerland, it was recommended that he return a month early to the United States to prepare for his unusual joint appointment at Berkeley and Caltech.

  Throughout the 1930s, Oppenheimer spent part of every summer in the mountains of New Mexico, and the Serbers, who were frequent visitors, took part in the spartan and vigorous life he led there. They discovered that for someone so slight, Oppie was deceptively strong, apparently immune to cold and hunger, and a fearless rider. He had a beautiful quarter horse, aptly named Crisis, that was every bit as high-strung as its owner. The “ranch,” as he called it, was a bare-bones operation, consisting of little more than a rough-hewn log cabin and corral with a half dozen horses, situated on a meadow at the base of Grass Mountain. There was no heat, except for the large wood stove in the kitchen, and no plumbing, save for the makeshift outhouse at the far end of the porch. In his autobiography, Serber noted that Oppie had formed the habit of sleeping outdoors during his spot of TB and seemed not to notice that his guests froze at night on their cots on the porch and that, at two miles above sea level, the smallest exertion left them “gasping for air.”

  Although the Serbers were inexperienced riders, Oppie insisted on taking them on weeklong expeditions into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, rising up 13,500 feet to the Truchas Peaks. “Always very solicitous about the horses and concerned they didn’t bear too much weight,” Serber wrote, Oppenheimer would pack plenty of oats for the animals, but barely enough provisions to keep his two-footed companions from starving to death. Oppie, who often neglected to eat, thought nothing of heading into the mountains alone for days on end with only a few chocolate bars in his pocket. In his autobiography, Serber repeats a telling, if apocryphal, description of a typical Oppie excursion as told to him by Ruth Valentine, a Pasadena psychologist and mutual friend: “It is midnight, and we are riding along a mountain ridge in a cold downpour, with lightning striking all around us. We come to a fork in the trail, and Oppie says, ‘That way it’s seven miles home, but this way it’s only a little longer, and it’s much more beautiful!’”

  It was in the spring of 1940 during a quick getaway to New Mexico that Oppie asked the Serbers to bring the married Kitty Harrison along, saying in passing, “I’ll leave it up to you. But if you do it might have serious consequences.” Kitty came, and Oppie rode off with her for an overnight visit to the Los Pinos ranch. The following day, a bemused Katherine Page trotted over to the ranch and hand-delivered Kitty’s nightgown, which had been discovered that morning under Oppie’s pillow. That fall, Kitty went to Nevada to obtain a divorce. On November 1, the same day her divorce was finalized, she and Oppenheimer were quietly married in Virginia City, Nevada. It all happened so quickly that when Oppie took Serber aside and disclosed that he had “some news,” Serber automatically assumed he had tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, with whom he had been having a tempestuous, on-again, off-again affair. Tatlock suffered from severe mood swings and was unstable. She had broken off with him once and for all a year earlier, and Oppie had been mourning her loss ever since. “I just gaped at him, trying to figure out whether he’d said Kitty or Jean,” recalled Serber. “Charlotte had to kick me to remind me to make the appropriate salutary noises.”

  The Serbers were not the only ones Oppenheimer invited out to spend time with him in his favorite habitat. Over the years, many of his colleagues ventured to the ranch, including Ernest Lawrence, Ed McMillan, George Gamow, George Placzek, Victor Weisskopf, and Hans and Rose Bethe, whom he happened to run into one day hiking in the area and brought home. Oppie would treat his guests to one of his incendiary chili dinners, known to some as “nasty gory,” and his brother, Frank, who played the flute almost as well as a professional, provided the entertainment. As a rule, talk of physics was forbidden, with exceptions made for special guests.

  Sustained by the grandeur and serenity of the mountains, Oppenheimer had conquered first illness and then loneliness. “My two great loves are physics and desert country,” he once wrote a friend. “It’s a pity they can’t be combined.” As in most things up to then, Oppenheimer eventually got his way.

  FIVE

  The Gatekeeper

  FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer and his key staff worked out of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue in the early mornings and made daily trips up to Los Alamos to inspect the progress of the construction. “The laboratories at the site were in a sketchy state, but that did not deter the workers,” Dorothy wrote of those hectic early days. “In the morning buses, consisting of station wagons, sedans or trucks, would leave 109 and pick up the men at the ranches and take them up the Hill. Occasionally, a driver would forget to stop at one or another of the ranches and the stranded and frustrated scientists would call in a white heat.”

  The “mañana spirit” indigenous to the area did not help matters. The local Spanish American drivers never understood why they had to make so many round-trips up the steep-sided, winding road, or why everyone was in such a hurry to get to such a barren settlement. Dorothy could never think of a good reason and instead tended to fall back on the project’s overused catchphrase, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” The drivers maintained such a slow, meandering pace that some scientists swore they would go mad. To hurry things along, Hugh Bradner commandeered anything with wheels and helped ferry men and equipment up to the site. Watching the motley-looking caravan come rolling back at the end of the day, Dorothy could only shake her head. It reminded her of what she had read about the Battle of the Marne in World War I, when the Parisians jumped into anything that could move and “hordes of taxis drove the French soldiers to the front.”

  Since none of the eating facilities on the mesa were operational yet, one of Dorothy’s first tasks was to procure the two dozen picnic lunches every day that were taken up to the scientists for their noontime meal. Because so many of the battered cars consigned to carry the lunches were in poor condition and frequently waylaid by flat tires, just feeding the physicists working on the site during those first few weeks proved a challenge. In order to avoid any unnecessary questions about their activities, Dorothy was careful not to buy all the sandwiches in one place; she went all over Santa Fe in search of different restaurants and cafés. It was a snowy spring, and given the wet weather, she knew any local shopkeeper “would have thought you were crazy to have a lot of boxed lunches.” She politely but firmly rebuffed the curious and, when required, told some tall tales to cover her tracks. Dorothy did not like lying, but became adept at it.

  Oppenheimer’s presence at 109 East Palace, and his importance to the project, not to mention the many classified documents he kept in his office, meant they were under surveillance at all times by army intelligence known as G-2. It was ironic that in this most secret of projects, Groves’ field safe was the only secure file in the director’s office and therefore by necessity served as a combination bank vault and lockbox for all the project’s valuables, including reserves of cash, confidential reports, and registered mail, as well as precious laboratory materials, including platinum and gold foils. Despite the gravity of the situation, Dorothy could not help laughing at the sight of the G-2 agents, who she learned t
o spot “a mile away.” Dressed in their matching three-piece suits and wingtips and positioned at the street corners, casually leaning against the drugstore, and loitering on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, they stood out in sharp contrast to the other pedestrians on the street. They wore snap-brimmed felt hats in winter, and when the weather turned warmer, snap-brimmed straw hats. They cruised the Plaza in identical black Chevy sedans, and Kevin told her that at night they parked in neat rows behind the Chevrolet garage at the edge of town. She was none too amused, however when two burly security guards manhandled her son at the entranceway to 109 not long after she started working there. When Kevin sauntered into the office after school one day in hopes of catching a ride home with his mother, they pulled him up short with a stern, “And where do you think you’re going, sonny?” After pleading with the guards to check with Mrs. McKibbin inside, he had the satisfaction of seeing them told off by his mother, who rushed out onto the patio flushed with anger. “She got them set straight pretty quick,” he said. After that, Kevin, who was fascinated by guns, took to dropping by after school every afternoon and became an expert on the different caliber guns the MPs carried.

  As the weeks went by, the town was crawling with clean-cut young FBI agents. No matter how well Dorothy got to know some of the men, the rule held that if they passed on the street, there could be no sign of recognition. If a suspicious person showed up at the office, or someone pestered her with too many prying questions, she had only to make a quick call to G-2 and one of the agents would be on the trail “by the time he hit the street.” For someone new to the spy game, Dorothy thought she showed great composure and believed she scared off her share of snoops. It seemed like a game at first, and she could not help being imaginative about German spies. But after a few unnerving encounters, she learned to be grateful for the added protection and the watchful gaze of her big gray standard poodle, Cloudy, who accompanied her to work every day.

  G-2’s secret office was located in the old post office across the street. The army had a separate office nearby in the Bishop Building, but there were plenty of mix-ups with people reporting to the wrong address, and they could not be too careful. On one memorable occasion, security called and alerted her that a suspected German operative was in the Plaza. “There is a spy coming your way and she’s dressed in an American tweed suit and speaks very good English,” the G-2 agent informed her, adding that she was in the company of an army sergeant. Dorothy decided she had better take a look for herself. She made a “constructive little trip” around the Plaza and peeked into one or two shops on Palace Avenue before spotting the woman in tweed, who was “very nice looking.” Dorothy hurried back to her station and was sitting at her desk when they came in. The woman demanded a pass for the site, explaining that she “had a ride with the sergeant.” Dorothy said pleasantly, “Well, that’s nice, and who are you [here] to see?” When the woman could not name the person who had requested she visit the site, Dorothy told her, “Well, I’m awfully sorry. I cannot possibly issue a pass to anyone unless I have instructions from the Hill to do so.” They went back and forth this way for five or ten minutes, the woman’s voice rising and the sergeant just standing there, while the security guards at the door looked on impassively. Dorothy stood her ground, and finally they stalked out. “She didn’t get up to the Hill,” Dorothy noted with satisfaction.

  Dorothy knew that most people were unaware of how many agents, or “creeps,” as they were sometimes called, were in town. Operatives rode the trains and buses in and out of Santa Fe, and a soldier from the Hill, going home on furlough, might find himself engaged in casual conversation with another GI in a smoker. If one of the soldiers was indiscreet, he might find himself in the clutches of detectives before he reached home. In such cases, he would be packed off to some rear-echelon post without so much as a court-martial. Even a closed trial, it was pointed out to her, would involve records and stenographers. Instead, the soldier would be sent to a commanding officer with secret orders assigning him to a remote Pacific island where there was no chance of being captured. Suspected agents were not immediately arrested, but put under twenty-four hour surveillance, so security could follow their trail and see who their friends were. As an example of G-2’s vigilance, Dorothy recalled the time a visitor made a random remark about machinery that caught G-2’s attention. She later learned he was “tailed” for 1,500 miles before finally being cleared. She heard stories about tipplers sounding off in bars as to what was going on up at the Hill while an operative stood at their elbow taking notes. If the loudmouth turned out to be a young laboratory staffer, he was hauled in front of G-2 for violating security and given harsh punishment. If it turned out he was just a rancher who had imbibed one too many, he was saved from a good grilling by the fact that he was plainly talking through his hat.

  Despite all the precautions and checkpoints, security agents worried constantly about espionage and the chance that an enemy agent would slip through their fingers. “We were haunted by G-2,” she told a reporter as her thoughts turned back to when the threat of spies was on everyone’s mind. “We needed to be. We were in a very dangerous spot as the frontier to Los Alamos.”

  The hours were long, and the pace fast, relentlessly so, as though “a spark was lighted day and night.” But the scientists’ sense of urgency and anticipation was contagious. Everything had to go through the office on East Palace, with many of the rules and ways of doing things improvised along the way. In the early days of the pass system, before the proper equipment arrived, Dorothy had to supply typewritten letters of identification to everyone going to the site, whether the person was a truck driver with a single load or a regular member of the staff. To top it off, because the letters were usually folded, read, and refolded repeatedly throughout the day, and carried in sweaty back pockets, a collection of torn illegible passes were turned in each week with a request for replacements. As Charlotte Serber, who was helping out in Oppie’s office, recalled, “They were a nuisance to type since no erasures were allowed, and the system resulted in writer’s cramp for the director, and bad tempers for the typists.”

  The phones rang incessantly. None of the lines were connected interoffice, so whenever Oppie got an important call, Dorothy would have to jump up and search the premises, drag him out of whatever office he happened to be in and then out across the courtyard, and force him to attend to the business at hand. When Oppie was on the Hill, he called down several times a day, usually inquiring about an overdue scientist and sending her on a frantic search for the missing individual. Usually, it turned out that the person was stuck out at a ranch in the valley and had been waiting for hours for one of the army’s antediluvian buses to rattle by. Dorothy would promise to do her best to rustle up some sort of transport, and she cheerfully advised physicists who had never in their lives been on a horse, “If not, I’m afraid you’ll just have to go on practicing your riding for a while.”

  Communication with the site was not easy, and the arduous process was enough to make an impatient scientist “tear his hair” while the operator repeated endlessly, “The line is busy.” The only existing telephone at the school was a primitive ranger’s phone that had a dozen parties on it and was operated by vigorously turning the small handle. The telephone line itself was made of iron wire, and there was no telling how many years ago the Forest Service had laid it down over the thirty-five miles between Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Charlotte Serber, who was working in the Tech Area one afternoon, went to answer the phone during a violent spring thunderstorm. Just as she reached for it, a bolt must have hit, and she saw a spark jump from the line to a lamp cord just inches away. Following that demonstration of the laws of physics, no one went near the phone in inclement weather. But even on a good day, it could take more than an hour to get a call through. Priscilla Greene, who was temporarily running the mail room, had to take over manning the switchboard at night because the scientists were getting so frustrated that they could not reach anyone. Moreov
er, the line, eaten away by chipmunks over the years, carried so much static, it was necessary to shout over and over again to make oneself understood. “We all yelled so loud you could probably hear us all the way from Santa Fe to Los Alamos,” said Dorothy, who screamed herself hoarse every morning just trying to find out how many mouths she had to feed. Charlotte remembered one call from the Hill asking them to send up eight extra lunches: “The request as we heard it above the noise, but lucidly could not fill, was for eight extra-large trucks.”

  One way or another, the phone was their nemesis. The scientists were fond of sending telegrams, but the only means they had of transmitting them was through the telephone operators. Most of the telegrams sounded a little silly because of the code the Tech Area used when referring to classified material: “top” for “atom”; “boat” for “bomb”; “spinning” for “smashing”; and “igloo of urchin” for “isotope of uranium.” The messages were never signed with proper names, and the Los Alamos physicists devised their own system of disguising their names, while Oppie and Groves employed a quadratic letter code that each man carried in his wallet throughout the war. “Western Union really must have hated us,” observed Charlotte. “There were wires in makeshift codes, wires that said only ‘Butane’ or ‘Yes.’ There were wires in foreign languages. Wires and more wires.” After a few weeks, they could spell words like PHYSIKALISCHE ZEITSHRIFT in their sleep.

  The chaos in the office often spilled outside onto the street on East Palace Avenue. There the army drivers stopped hourly for personnel going up to the Hill, pulling up so close to the curb that the huge green buses would crash into the sagging corner of the old portal and its ancient posts. Young WACs (Women’s Army Corps personnel) driving official cars, or “taxis,” as they were euphemistically referred to by project members, parked out front until they were dispatched to Lamy to pick up important visitors. Nervous young scientists, driving trucks for the Procurement Office, paced outside, waiting for the delivery of equipment so sensitive it could only be shepherded up the bumpy, torturous mountain road by one of them. The narrow old street was never intended to accommodate such a circus, and the traffic would become backed up, and the police summoned. Invariably, one of the bus drivers would be given a summons for blocking the road and creating a hazard if the fire trucks needed to pass in a hurry. Worse yet, the physicists, many of whom came from abroad and were always driving on the wrong side of the road, would be ticketed and would come into her office waving their hands and protesting loudly. Dorothy would then have to trot round to the local magistrate, who was aware of the project’s existence if not its purpose, and using all her feminine charms, plead with him to tear up all the tickets and set things right with the town authorities. In turn, she would promise that the army buses would stand at her door for only brief intervals. Then everything would be fine for a few days until the next crisis.